8.22.2017

8.11.2017

I have a question for you: How do you feel when reading your past works?

Doesn't matter if you consider yourself a writer or not, you've written something, be it an academic essay or a dozen novels. So, as you distance yourself from those things via the passage of time, how does your view of them change? Does it become embarrassing to go through them, and you'd rather rip the page out or delete the file than let it continue to exist?

Maybe you get this gut-wrenching feeling whenever someone goes to read them...

Writers have a tendency to hate their old works, and some prefer to pretend that such works never reached paper (or screen, in many of our cases). Thing is, though, that we all have those crappy first stories, and as time passes and our skills improve, it doesn't even have to be an "early" writing to suck. It just has to be old.

That's a good thing, though! Means you've gotten better, and now you can recognize what you did wrong before. Or at least that it wasn't as perfect as it felt when you first wrote it.

(But don't be like me and actually delete them all. You'll almost certainly regret it, I promise.)

Just thought I'd throw that out there, 'cause I've got a fun little tag to go through and it's on this very subject.

A big thank you to Lisa at Inkwell for tagging me for the Early Writings Tag, started by Abbiee!